Tuesday, 28 February 2017

The enduring image of Robert Icke's Hamletis family - the repeated motif of group of three cleaving together haunts the production as much as Hamlet's father himself. From the instant and intense bond established between Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes, Icke makes striking emotional sense of the respective grief and ferocity of the latter two, powerfully played by Jessica Brown Findlay and Luke Thompson against Peter Wight's twinkling charm as their father.

And Icke also gives the tragic visual of Andrew Scott's Hamlet trying to rebuild his original family unit, joining hands with his mother and the ghost of his father in the midst of the closet scene, willing Juliet Stevenson's Gertrude to see what he sees, to put things back the way they used to be. And in a stunning montage for the final scene, these trios reform, emphasising the innate happiness of one and the deep tragedy of the other. It is deeply, deeply felt.

Monday, 27 February 2017

Colette Kane'sI Know How I Feel About Eve played at the Hampstead Downstairs space in 2013 and she now returns there with Scarlett, another of her plays destined to only be reviewed by the odd blogger due to the no press policy there. I'd be interested to see if it will be open to the critical community when it moves to co-producing partner Theatre Clwyd next month as the rationale behind excluding press - to create "a unique experience" - has always felt slightly odd.

Be that as it may, Scarlett offers a sadly all-too-rare opportunity at the Hampstead to see a play that is written, directed and exclusively stars women, something they should be happy to be publicising. We first meet its London-based title character on a weekend away to Wales which has extended into something longer, exactly how long is unsure but she's been looking at properties in the local estate agent and has found a dilapidated chapel and is ready to buy.

I'd be fibbing if I tried to claim that rock is my kind of music. Although even as I say that, I've a residual fondness for the big hair and tunes of Heart from my childhood, Skunk Anansie figured large in my teenage years, and seeing Peaches live at the Astoria is one of my all time live music highlights, so evidently I'm more partial to (female) rock than I instinctively realise.

And maybe it's just my frame of reference but elements of all three intermittently came to mind in Lizzie, written by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer, Alan Stevens Hewitt and Tim Maner. The storytelling of opener 'The House of Borden' is rooted in melodious soft rock, Eden Espinisa's extraordinary vocal can't help but bring to mind Skin at her fiercest and the chants of Somebody Will Do Something' felt but a breath away from 'Fuck the Pain Away'.

At a moment in British history when the political discourse around the contribution of (at least part of) the immigrant population has never been more highly charged, Patricia Cumper's Chigger Foot Boys could not be more timely. A largely unheralded part of the British Army in the First World War were the 15,600 men who formed the British West Indies Regiment, volunteers from British colonies who provided invaluable service and yet received despicable treatment.

Cumper is far too canny a writer to make her play - based on meticulous research and inspired by real events - that didactic though. The consequences of colonial attitudes and their prejudices are implicit, threaded through every heartbeat of her five fictional characters but never the sole focus, complicated as they are by the intersection of so many other things like cruel twists of fate and the full spectrum of human nature from its self-sabotaging worst to its soul-searching best, to create the rich fabric of their own narratives.

Sunday, 26 February 2017

When you see as much theatre as I do, it can be difficult to keep up to date with cinematic releases - if I have a night off, I rarely want to spend it in a dark room... - but I have tried my best this year to see at least some of the Oscar-nominated films, so that I can chip in once they've been distributed in a way that will doubtless cause some controversy or other.

Arrival - I absolutely adored this and am a little surprised it didn't figure higher in some of the bigger prizes, Denis Villeneuve's intelligent and restrained direction, Jóhann Jóhannsson's beautifully elegiac score, Bradford Young's cinematography evoking all the potential of worlds beyond our ken. And of course Amy Adams, deeply moving as the linguistics professor whose life is opened up by her encounters with alien beings who just want to talk.

Time for the monthly visit to Austentatiousand this trip saw Jane Austen's undiscovered novel Tears and Torsos get its first airing, including all manner of slippery clay, parents inside a tiger, nudity, promiscuity and a diablo maniac in Brighton. As ever, it remains a brilliant way to spend a Sunday night, over and done with in an hour which means you can go home (like my friends did) or carry on drinking (like I accidentally did). Either way, you really should get yourselves along to one of their shows sooner or later. London dates here and UK dates here.

Originally developed as live shows in Melbourne and the Edinburgh Festival, multi-award winning and 'two-time Edinburgh Comedy Award Nominee' comic storyteller Sarah Kendall is set to bring her critically acclaimed trilogy of funny and moving stories to BBC Radio 4 starting on Tuesday 28th February.

Sarah is a storytelling maestro, and in these three half-hour shows - A Day in October, Touchdown and Shaken - she gives a unique snapshot of small-town life in Australia in the late 80s and early 90s. At a time when most people were seeing Australians through the filter of Home and Away and Neighbours, Sarah’s shows present a darker underbelly to the stereotype of the sun-loving, happy-go-lucky Aussie teenager.

Effortlessly combining comedy and tragedy in equal measure, Sarah's tales of her teenage life blend intricate narratives with a cast of memorable characters, providing belly laughs along with moments of heart wrenching poignancy.

Casting news aplenty from the last week, the highlight of which was Cush Jumbo and Lois Chimimba joining Anne-Marie Duff in Commonat the National. Also, Indira Varma and Julian Ovenden join the previously announced Aisling Loftus and Matthew Needham in Martin Crimp's The Treatmentat the Almeida. That cast is completed by Gary Beadle, Ian Gelder, Ben Onwukwe, Ellora Torchia and Hara Yannas.

It's all about the poster... Sienna Miller and Jack O'Connell will star in a production of Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roofat the Apollo Theatre this summer. The production will be directed by Benedict Andrews (A Streetcar Named Desire) and produced by the Young Vic. It is the first Young Vic production to debut in the West End following transfers including A View from a Bridge, Golem and The Scottsboro Boys.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof will run at the Apollo Theatre from 24 July to 7 October, with previews from 13 July.

After the resounding success of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s State Fair (Cadogan Hall November 2016) and the sell out concert of Alan Menken & Lynn Ahrens' A Christmas Carol (Lyceum Theatre, December 2016), with numerous five star reviews for both performances, The London Musical Theatre Orchestra is delighted to announce casting for its first concert of the 2017 season, Jason Robert Brown's hit Broadway musical Honeymoon in Vegas which will take to the London Palladium stage on 12th March 2017

Samantha Barks (Betsy) and Arthur Darvill (Jack) will be Maxwell Caulfield (Tommy), Rosemary Ashe (Bea), Nicolas Colicos (Johnny) and Simon Lipkin (Buddy), with supporting roles played by Daniel Amity, Maisey Bawden and Hywel Dowsell. Other roles in the production will be played by members of the LMTO chorus, including: Will Arundell, Lizzie Bea, Austin Garrett, Alice Gruden, Charlotte Kennedy, Richard James King, Emma Kingston, Lauren Lockley, Laura Messin, Oliver Stanley and Samuel Thomas.

Thursday, 23 February 2017

Joe Hill-Gibbins' idiosyncratic 2015 take on Measure for Measure filled the Young Vic with inflatable sex dolls so it should come as little surprise that for his A Midsummer Night's Dream, he and designer Johannes Schütz have transformed the stage into a muddy paddock. With just a mirrored back wall to add to the set, the scene is thus set for an exploration of the "subconscious" of this most oft-seen (particularlyintheyeargoneby) of Shakespeare's plays.

There's some great work, delving into the murkiness of the relationships here. Far from spirits "of no common rate", these royal fairies feel like a real married couple in the throes of having to work things out yet again, Michael Gould's Oberon's manipulations as much as anguished as angry, and Anastasia Hille's Titania relishing the removal of the ball and chain as she plays sex games with Bottom, roleplaying the attending fairies in a witty twist. The intensity of their connection repeats itself later in another clever connection.

There's something admirable in actors who remain loyal to their roots - I'm thinking of the likes of Maxine Peake who has established a good deal of her stage career in her native North West and now Vicky McClure, who is making her professional stage debut in Nottingham, the town of her birth. Riding high on sterling TV credits like This is England and Line of Duty, she likely had opportunities aplenty in London theatres so it is salutary that it is to Nottingham Playhouse she has turned.

And not only that, it is to a local play by a local writer, Stephen Lowe's Touched, which lends the 1977 play a real sense of authenticity (and more exposure to Nottingham dialect than I've ever had before!). Set in 1945 in the 100 day period between VE Day and VJ Day, it focuses on the lives of the women left holding the country together in this time of great upheaval, which shows no signs of slowing down as a new Labour government look set to win the election and nuclear bombs about to fall.

Shortlists for the third annual Also Recognised Awards have been announced by MyTheatreMates, founded by Mark Shenton and Terri Paddock. These audience-voted industry accolades celebrate talent in fields often overlooked by other award bodies. Voting is now open for all categories and closes on Sunday 26th March 2017. Cast your vote at: www.mytheatremates.com/AlsoRecognisedAwards-2017/.

The aim of the awards is to recognise some of those categories that are sometimes overlooked in other awards - for example, Best Musical Direction is one that is sadly unique to the Also Recognised roster. There's also a nod to the behind-the-scenes folk with awards for Best Twitter Engagement, Show Trailer and Show Poster recognising the invaluable part that marketing, especially digitally, has to play in the industry.

So find the shortlists below and head over to My Theatre Mates to cast your vote. I helped to draw up these lists along with Mark and Terri, Andrew Keates and Mike Dixon, and the rest of the My Theatre Mates collective, and I think the blend of West End, Off-West End, fringe and regional nominees reflects that, so I'll be most interested to see how the results pan out.

There's nowt so queer as folk, at least not in Simon Godwin's version of Illyria here. A gender-swapped Malvolia longs after her mistress Olivia, hipster-fop Sir Andrew Aguecheek is entirely smitten by a flirtatious Toby Belch, Antonio follows up his snog with Sebastian by inviting him to a rendez-vous at local drag bar The Elephant. And that's before we've even dealt with the sexual confusion that Shakespeare himself engineered in Twelfth Night, as shipwreck survivor Viola disguises herself as her presumed drowned twin brother and wreaks havoc on the libidos of Olivia and Orsino alike.

It's a mark of the success of Godwin's production that it wears this all so lightly. It's a modern-dress version for a modern sensibility (if not for the audience member who gasped audibly at the first gay kiss) and one that is rooted in a real sense of playfulness, as an expertly cast ensemble just have a huge amount of fun with it. Phoebe Fox's delicious Olivia, who gives new life to the phrase 'dance like nobody's watching'; Oliver Chris' Chelsea playboy of an Orsino, in the throes of a mid-life crisis having just turned 40; Tim McMullan's swaggeringly confident Sir Toby ever accompanied by Niky Wardley's spirited Maria and the comic masterpiece that is Daniel Rigby's Sir Andrew.

Monday, 20 February 2017

There's no doubting the visual flair that choreographer Drew McOnie is able to conjure in his work - In The Heightsand Jesus Christ Superstar being just two recent examples - and so it is no coincidence that his move into directing has begun with dance-heavy pieces. Strictly Ballroom lit up the stage at the West Yorkshire Playhouse before Christmas and now The Wild Partyopens up the programming at The Other Palace, Andrew Lloyd Webber's rebranded St James Theatre.

Michael John LaChiusa's musical version is not the first adaptation of Joseph Moncure March's epic poem to hit London this year - that title goes to the Hope Theatre's two hander from last month. But it does have its own tunes presented as a vaudeville, a real mish-mash of every 1920s style you can think of and more, which makes for a bold and brash evening - especially as performed by this lavishly assembled ensemble - but ultimately, one of little staying power.

I hadn't intended to write about this spin-off from The Good Wife but its opening two episodes were just too full of insane goodness impossible to ignore - I mean just look at that poster art for one. The earlier seasons of The Good Wife were fantastic, US network television close to its best, but the show definitely lost some of its sparkle as its core ensemble collapsed and none of the replacement cast members were able to deal with the unchecked gravititational vortex of its key star Julianna Margulies as Saint Alicia Florrick.

Two victims of this were Christine Baranski's Diane Lockhart, in there from the beginning and much abused by the end, and Cush Jumbo's Lucca Quinn whose arrival in the seventh and final season promised much but ultimately suffered from writing that would not, could not, allow her independence from Florrick. So it is tempting to see The Good Fight as an apologia from series creators Robert King and Michelle King as, along with Rose Leslie's newcomer Maia Rindell, they form the three leads of a brand new ensemble show that is serving up life!

Sunday, 19 February 2017

Henry Carpenter's The Quentin Dentin Showwas a deserved Edinburgh whose late night charm transferred well to the late night slot at the Above the Arts Theatre last year, so it makes sense that his new musical, Summer Nights in Space, billed as a sequel in spirit if not in content, has opened as part of The Vaults festival. But where I was seduced by the random insanity of its predecessor, this new sci-fi musical still feels like a work-in-progress with work still to be done.

All John Spartan has ever wanted to do is go to outer space but like many a man with an obsession, this dedication has come at a cost to his friendships and marriage as he finds himself packed off on a solo mission, which ultimately isn't at all what it seems. Matthew Jacobs Morgan's space traveller is thus left to carry a huge amount of the show by himself and sadly, Carpenter's book just doesn't give him enough material to sell it as a dynamic one-man-show.

Here's the full list of the 17th Annual WhatsOnStage Awards winners. No real surprises here, there rarely is with these awards voted for by the public but it is nice to see a real spread across the musicals categories rather than one show dominating as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child does with the plays. And we'll just ignore the leniency with the deadlines that meant Dreamgirls was able to sneak in despite having only played a handful of previews by the time nominations closed...congrats to all the winners and nominees.Best Actor in a Play, sponsored by Radisson Blu Edwardian
Ian Hallard for The Boys in the Band
Ian McKellen for No Man's LandJamie Parker for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child WINNER
Kenneth Branagh for The Entertainer
Ralph Fiennes for Richard III

Saturday, 18 February 2017

Back when Adam Sandler was, you know, tolerable, he did rom-coms like 1998's The Wedding Singer and where even moderately successful films go, musical theatre adaptations surely follow. Tim Herlihy adapts his own screenplay along with lyricist Chad Beguelin, and original music comes from Matthew Sklar, and the result is a perfectly competent piece of musical theatre which is fun without ever really being fantastic.

Opening at Leicester's Curve ahead of a 8 month long UK tour (dates and venue at the end of this review), you can see where Nick Winston's production has made its key decisions - Francis O’Connor's set has its eye on quick get-outs and so Jack Henry's video projections do a lot of the heavy lifting in setting the 80s milieu. And the casting mixes West End reliability with TV name recognition, the cherry on the cake of course being Ruth Madoc.

Romola Garai will star as Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough alongside Emma Cunniffe as the eponymous monarch in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Queen Anne. They will be joined by Jonathan Christie, Michael Fenton-Stevens, James Garnon, Richard Hope, Hywel Morgan, Beth Park and Carl Prekopp with further casting to be announced soon.

After originally opening at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2015, Queen Anne will transfer to Theatre Royal Haymarket for a thirteen week limited run from 30 June until 30 September. Written by Helen Edmundson (The Heresy of Love, RSC) and directed by Natalie Abrahami (Happy Days, Young Vic), this gripping play explores the life of one of England’s little-known sovereigns and her intimate friendship with her childhood confidante Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough.

Tucked away in Camberwell,The Blue Elephant announced a new season of collaborations with exciting emerging artists, bringing urgent, thought-provoking and intriguing work to the black-box fringe venue in Camberwell.

The Blue Elephant continues to support work at all stages of development and the season includes scratch nights and work-in-progress showings as well as Haste Theatre’s Oyster Boy and Resuscitate’s Rounds. Both these shows have had successful past productions but are now premiering ‘revamped’ and further developed versions at the Blue Elephant in March.

Other highlights include When the Dove Returns, by recent East 15 graduates Backpack Theatre, and Female Intuition, two nights of new writing written and directed by women.

The season closes with a new production of Twelfth Night by Original Impact Theatre, reimagining the play for new audiences.

Co-Artistic Director, Niamh de Valera, says,

“We’re delighted to share this season with you and are looking forward to audiences’ reactions. We feel very lucky that we’re able to continue our work supporting emerging artists and programming really special, engaging shows, as the future is always so uncertain. We do have to raise a lot of money to stay open for the next year but we’re starting on a high note with a season we’re very excited about so we’re hopeful it will set the tone for the year!”

Jack Thorne's new version is described thus: 'It’s 1980s Berlin. The Cold War rages and the world sits at a crossroads between Capitalism and Communism. On the border between East and West, a young soldier and the love of his life are desperately trying to build a better future for their child. But the cost of escaping poverty is high, and its tragic consequences unfold in this searing tale of the people society leaves behind'. Could be a good'un.

Thursday, 16 February 2017

"This is a true story. Events are told exactly as they happened, apart from the ones that are completely made up"

Part of the New Diorama's Emerging Theatre Company Programme 2015, Lost Watch have spent the last four years building quite the reputation for themselves. Their latest show Flew the Coop takes inspiration from a photograph of real-life British prisoner of war Horace Greasley and Silesian translator Rosa Rauchbach, for whom he claims he escaped over 200 times in order to conduct a love affair.

It is told, with great energy and enthusiasm, through the prism of the Rauchbach Greasley Association Society Club (RGASC), a motley crew of Silesians (a historic region now split between Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic) who lovingly re-enact the story of their heroes with great ingenuity, using an array of brooms, brushes, sticks and buckets and not much more besides.

We should be talking about Sheffield, and how its place in the fragile ecosystem of British musical theatre has only become more and more invaluable. Nurturing shows like Flowers For Mrs Harris and This Is My Family into existence and taking pride in their understated nature, the venue has also been incubating new writing talent. Well, new to musical theatre at least, for Dan Gillespie Sells is the lead singer-songwriter of The Feeling and Tom MacRae has written several episodes of Doctor Who and sitcom Threesome. And inspired by a BBC3 documentary, a meeting with director Jonathan Butterell and a fairy godmother-like intervention from Michael Ball, the result is brand spanking new musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie.

And what a joy it is, a breath of feel-good fresh air that can't help but leave you feeling fabulous. With career advice flying by unheeded, all 16-year-old Jamie is really bothered about as his school-time comes to an end is whether he will attend the school prom as his drag persona Mimi Me or not. And rather brilliantly, the writing hones in on Jamie just as a young man - yes he's queer and a kween but he's also a person still finding out the extent of his identity and how to relate to a wider world that isn't necessarily always set against him. It's a refreshing take on LGBT+ storytelling, and a sorely needed one, tipping its hat to the tales of coming out and battling against intolerance that have gone before and then finding its own space to parse the consequences of being this fierce in the real world.

Wednesday, 15 February 2017

In what's been a blistering start to the televisual year (Unforgotten, The Moorside), the second series of Paul Abbott's No Offence is definitely up there, offering at least a little comic relief along with its deadly serious dark side. My views on episode 1 set the tone for the rest to come - the glorious return of the Friday Street team, led by Joanna Scanlan's inimitable DI Viv Deering, having met their match in the arch-villain Nora Attah, a glorious performance from Rakie Ayola.

And typical of Abbott's oeuvre, along with his co-writers, there's a fantastic complexity to his characters. Attah may rule her gangland with a rod of iron, issuing icy reprisals against rivals who dare cross her path, but as subplots about FGM and sexual violence are threaded through the season, there's strong hints about the harshness of the world that has shaped her. And that makes her the ideal counterpart for Deering's anarchic policing style, our sympathies caught in the complex conflict between their respective shades of grey.

The problem with using superlatives is that it is so easy to get carried away. And having declared the second series of Unforgottento be sure of being one of the best pieces of television we'll see this year, I'm now having to add The Moorside to that same category. The first episode blew me away and the second, directed by Paul Whittington and written by Neil McKay, confirmed the show as a devastating tour de force.

Occupying the slightly hazy ground of docudrama, where real-life events are augmented with highly researched dramatised scenes, The Moorside nevertheless smacks of the ring of truth from start to finish. The second instalment picks up with Shannon Matthews having been found by the police and whilst the community who came together so dramatically to search for her celebrate, questions about Karen Matthews' involvement in the disappearance of her daughter hang ominously in the air.

Tuesday, 14 February 2017

Cover Her Face, Inky Cloak's trans reinterpretation of The Duchess of Malfi is one of those rare things, a show that has properly stuck in my memory, so the news of their new show - the intriguingly titled We Raise Our Hands in the Sanctuary- was most pleasing indeed. That it promised an uplifting story of the power of gay friendship and the enduring importance of queer spaces, plus the pulsing beats of 1980s club sounds, was the cherry on the proverbial.

Set in 1981, two young black gay men discover the safe haven of the London gay club scene, but only find real sanctuary when they take advantage of the connections they're building to create their own club night to reflect and respect all the things they are - black, British, gay, fabulous. Success, as ever though, comes at a cost, and not just personally in what proved to be a most devastating decade for the LGBT community.

“You might put me in prison but let me tell you this: you can’t judge me unless you’ve had it done to you.”

Blimey, I knew Unforgotten was good (here's my Episode 1 review, and my Series 1 review) but I wasn't expecting it to be this soul-shatteringly excellent. More fool me I suppose, Nicola Walker is a god among mortals and her presence alone is reliably proving a harbinger of excellence, but allied to Chris Lang's scorching writing, it's hard to imagine that we'll see much better television than this before the year is out.

That it managed this by using elements that have been seen recently (historical child sex abuse as perLine of Duty; the Strangers on a Train twist featured in Silent Witness just last month) and imbuing them with a compelling freshness is impressive enough, but the way in which it revealed this at the mid-point of the series and yet still had hooks and surprises aplenty to keep me gripped right until the bitterly haunting end.

Monday, 13 February 2017

Sex sells. And so Arthur Schnitzler's 1897 play of 10 interlinked intimate encounters has proven enduringly popular over the years - adapted for the gays, for fans of musicals, for Charlie Spencer's libido... - and now Max Gill has taken a decidedly 21st century gender-neutral approach toLa Ronde for the opening salvo in the Bunker's second season. A giant roulette wheel dominates Frankie Bradshaw's set and as it spins, it is thus left to chance to dictate who of the company - 2 women, 2 men - will tag in to play the next two-hander (or not as the case may be, the wheel refusing to land on one of the actors on press night).

So from Premier Inns in Hillingdon to doctors' surgeries, bland apartments to hot and sweaty lifts, all sorts of shenanigans play out. Tinder dates gone awry, ex-lovers unable to resist each other, sex workers going about their business, marriages gone stale, the unpredictable nature of the casting means that everything is up for grabs here and between them, Alexander Vlahos, Amanda Wilkin, Lauren Samuels and Leemore Marrett Jr do a fine job, whether it is Vlahos slipping into black PVC hotpants or Wilkins nailing each and every one of her vivid characterisations.

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I write reviews of plays, sometimes with a critical element, on this blog. But call me a reviewer, a critic or a blogger, and you will apparently put someone or other's nose out of joint! So take it or leave it, essentially this is my theatrical diary, recording everything I go to see at the theatre in London and beyond, and venturing a little into the worlds of music and film/tv where theatrical connections can be made.